DeepL translation

YAN Yilong: These six questions about “democracy” have been answered differently in China and the West.

The 2nd International Forum on “Democracy: Common Value for All Mankind” was held in Beijing on the 23rd. Li Shulei, member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Minister of the Central Propaganda Department, attended the opening ceremony of the forum and delivered a keynote speech.

The forum was held in a combination of offline and online, hundreds of Chinese and foreign guests from more than 100 countries, regions and international organizations focused on “democracy and sustainable development”, “democracy and innovation”, “democracy and global governance”, “democracy and global governance”, “democracy and sustainable development” and “democracy and global governance”. This article is written by YAN Yilong, Associate Professor of School of Public Administration, Tsinghua University, Vice President of Institute of National Condition of Tsinghua University, who was invited to speak on the topic of “Democracy and Sustainable Development”, “Democracy and Innovation”, “Democracy and Global Governance”, “Democracy and the Diversity of Human Civilization”, and “Democracy and the Path of Modernization”. This article is the text of the speech.

Democracy is the common pursuit of all mankind, and it is also the proper meaning of modern politics. Modern democracy is not a unique standard, but a pluralistic form, with a hundred flowers competing for color. The West practices representative democracy centered on competitive elections, while China promotes full-process people’s democracy. These two types of democracy give different answers to six questions about democracy.

The first question is, what is democracy, appearance or essence? Aristotle once said that when a person is trapped by a difficult problem, it is as if he is bound by a rope and cannot move. In fact, when a person is trapped by narrow concepts, he will also be unable to move as if he were tied up with a rope. On the question of how to look at democracy, what binds many people’s perceptions in the world today is that representative democracy centered on competitive elections is regarded as the only form of modern democracy, the only standard, when in fact it is only one of the manifestations of democracy.

To understand democracy, one can use a concept from traditional Chinese philosophy - body-phase-use, the essence, the appearance and the use. Everything has a body and a use. For example, the body of a car is that it has to have a power unit, a directional unit and so on, and it has to be a means of transportation; at the same time, it has a variety of appearances, and there are different brands of cars with different displacements, and the use is that it can carry people and goods and so on.

Democracy also has a body and a use. As far as the essence of democracy is concerned, we have to go back to the original meaning of democracy, which is that the people are the masters of their own house, or that the people should be in power, and at the same time, the power should be in the service of the people. The phase of democracy refers to its various forms of manifestation, such as democracy by lot, democracy by election, democracy by consultation, direct democracy, indirect democracy, and so on. It is used to say that democracy will have different application scenarios, and democracy is practiced in a country in order to govern the country better.

Western-style modern democracy is only one of the appearances of democracy. From the perspective of the development of democracy, it is far away from the original meaning of democracy and the essence of democracy, which is the degradation of the Western concept of democracy from “direct democracy” to substantive democracy to procedural democracy, and at the same time, in the 1980’s, the problem of deterioration of democracy has emerged, as stated by Mr. Chu Yun-han, a political scientist from Taiwan, who passed away recently. At the same time, since the 1980s of the last century, there has been what Mr. Zhu Yunhan, a political scientist from Taiwan who has just passed away, called the problem of the deterioration of democracy. To regard this narrow, superficial and inferior democracy as a beacon of democracy is like regarding a vintage car in disrepair and rattling as the benchmark of modern automobiles, while considering all other makes and models as not automobiles.

There are two qualifiers for China’s all-consuming people’s democracy, the first qualifier being the people, which is from the ontology of democracy. People’s democracy looks like agreement over and over again, and the people of democracy are also the people, so why add a qualifier of the people? This qualifier precisely stipulates the ontological attributes of democracy, that it belongs to the people, and that it is the democracy of the majority, not the minority, which we safeguard in the state system, the system of government, and the mechanism for the operation of democracy.

The second qualifier is the whole process, which is defined at the level of phase and use. People’s democracy in the whole process is a kind of democracy with a whole chain, multiple channels, multiple levels and multiple scenarios. The whole chain refers to the implementation of democracy along the entire chain from selection and hiring, decision-making, management, and supervision. Multi-channel means that there are different channels, such as the Party’s mass line, deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC), democratic decision-making by the government, democratic management, and consultation with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Multi-level refers to the central government level, local government level, grass-roots democracy, etc. The forms are also diverse, election is only one of them, consultation, evaluation, selection, etc. are all forms of democratic realization. Multi-scenario means that it can be applied in different scenarios, including major scenarios such as national decision-making and governance, as well as specific micro-scenarios such as community governance, mediation of civil disputes, and poverty alleviation in rural areas.

Why does full-process people’s democracy seem much more complicated than competitive elections? This is because through every means, form and channel has its own limitations, through so many forms and means to maximize the approach to the essence of people’s sovereignty.

The second question is, whose democracy? Is it the democracy of the majority or of the minority? The Western view of democracy from Athens onwards is that democracy does not belong to the majority; according to estimates, citizens probably only account for about 1/10 of the total population, and women, Gentiles, and slaves are not considered citizens. [1] Since modern times, the West has also gone through a long process of universal suffrage, and today, although universal suffrage has been realized in most countries, it does not mean that democracy belongs to the majority. The people are essentially only voters, as Sartori said, in the modern Western democratic perspective of the people are only specific individuals, or according to the principle of the vast majority, the principle of the limited majority of the majority refers to the majority of the people [2].

At the same time, one of the manifestations of the deterioration of Western democracy is the decline in voter turnout, the proportion of people voting in various types of elections such as presidential and parliamentary elections is declining, statistics show that the average turnout in the 77 countries that adopted the majority system in the 1990s was only 60.4%,[3] in which case, according to the principle of simple majority, a candidate only needs to get a little more than 30% of the votes in order to get elected, meaning that getting elected is not the same as truly representing the majority. is not the same as truly representing the majority.

More importantly, although the people have the right to universal suffrage, but the voters have not met the politicians famous, see the media packaged persona, the voters are difficult to have a systematic understanding of professional public policy, more concerned about personal short-term interests, these factors lead to voters are difficult to make rational decisions. The general public can not determine the operation of public policy, the largest beneficiary group of public policy is still a minority, so Stiglitz said that today’s United States it is no longer the people have, the people rule, the people enjoy, it is 1% have, 1% rule, 1% enjoy.

People’s democracy in the whole process is the democracy belonging to all the people, and the people include the following meanings at the same time.

First, people in the individual sense. When we talk about the development of people’s livelihood, solving the urgent problems of the people, and guaranteeing the people’s right to vote, we are referring to the people in the individual sense.

Second, the vast majority of the people. When we talk about the concept of the people, we always refer to the vast majority of the people, and we always stand on the side of the vast majority of the people. In the evolution of the concept of the people, the category of the people covers almost everyone, and only counter-revolutionary and criminal elements in the legal sense are excluded from the people.

Third, people in the overall sense. Western-style democracy does not recognize that there are people in the overall sense, but it is precisely only when we agree that there are people in the overall sense that we are able to ensure the overall, long-term and fundamental interests of the people. For example, high-speed rail is an example, probably China and the United States at about the same time have the dream of high-speed rail, in 2011 Obama also had the ambition to make high-speed rail coverage of 80% of the population, to date, the United States high-speed rail is only a few hundred kilometers, China’s high-speed rail has reached 42,000 kilometers, which is a case in which the interests of the people as a whole can be effectively manifested, whereas if to the United States as just different political parties, different states, different enterprises, different interest groups, different individuals’ fragmented interests, regardless of the holistic interests, it will be very difficult to effectively promote the public infrastructure involving the interests of all the people with a high degree of externalities.

The fourth refers to the lower and middle classes. This is related to the purpose of the CPC. The basic masses of the CPC are the working class and the peasantry, so its policies are biased toward taking care of the middle and lower classes. We have just accomplished a feat in the history of human poverty reduction, realizing the lifting of nearly 100 million rural poor out of poverty in ten years, and realizing the holistic lifting of the rural population out of poverty, and in the next step we have to persistently push forward the common wealth.

The third question is whether democracy chooses people who are good at governing or people who are good at putting on a show. Western-style democracy, mainly through competitive elections to produce national leaders, but this will bring a problem, that is, some businessmen, actors and other inexperienced and qualifications of political vegetarians to become the president, which does not conform to the basic logic of modern career growth, because almost all modern careers, basically need to be in accordance with the seniority, work ability, work performance step by step to promote, but assumed that the president of the most important career can rise to the top in one step without going through the career ladder.

Of course, another assumption is that the strongest person can be selected through the election mechanism, the problem is that people who are good at election may not be good at governing the country, there was a saying in the United States back then that “Election is poetry, governance is prose”, which is not a match between the two. In today’s era when traffic is king, one of the manifestations of the deterioration of democracy is that election has become a show, and the ability of election has become the ability of show, and being good at fund-raising, creating issues, putting on a show, stirring up emotions, and pulling in the traffic does not mean that one is good at governing the country.

Another indicator of the deterioration of democracy is that the spoils of political parties and the politics of payoffs are still prevalent. In the past, there was a spoils system for political parties in the U.S. competitive election system, and the problem was solved through various reforms of the civil service, but in fact, in today’s election, it’s still a spoils system, and the winner has the right to distribute the spoils of war, and the U.S. president has the right to appoint about 7,000 government officials, of which only about 500 need to be approved by the Senate. Senate approval is required, and overall the appointment process is fairly arbitrary, and can be thrown at one’s friends, relatives, or those who have helped in the election process, so that Trump is constantly tweeting to officials telling them you’ve been fired, and in fact other presidents have done the same thing, except that Trump has brought it to the forefront.

“A prime minister must start in the state department, and a fierce general must start in the pawn corps.” China’s whole process of people’s democracy officials are produced mainly through competitive selection, many provinces in China is tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, equivalent to the size of the population of the world’s big countries, ruling the province is equivalent to ruling the country, after familiarizing themselves with the local situation, but also familiar with the national situation, before entering the Standing Committee of the Politburo. President Xi Jinping first ruled a village (6 years), a county (3 years), a city (11 years, 3 cities), and a province (11 years, 3 provinces), and he went through the experience in the party system, the administrative system, the NPC system, and the military system before he went to the central government to rule the country, and he also went through 5 years of experience at the central government before he became the country’s top leader.

The competitive selection system ensures that government officials have rich practical experience, and more importantly, they are tested by practice, not by votes, and become national leaders only through layers of training, testing and selection. China’s competitive selection system is a kind of selection method that screens out practical and professional governing teams.

The fourth question is whether democracy is one-way or two-way. Political democracy is essentially a discussion of the relationship between the people and the government. Democracy should be reflected both in the input of public opinion and the output of government services for the people. Western democracy, whether it is Athenian democracy, classical democracy, or modern procedural democracy, emphasizes democracy at the input end; it is democratic for the people to be able to draw lots, to vote, and to participate, and whether or not the government is doing things for the people is not part of the scope of consideration of the theory of democracy. This is due to its thinking on the system of government, otherwise it would not be able to make an effective distinction between democracy and monarchy and aristocracy. In terms of democratic practice, this one-sided mode of democratic thinking will bring about a great misunderstanding in the democratic exploration of mankind, and will make it possible that the government that may be elected may completely deviate from public opinion, or may not do practical things for the people at all.

Chinese-style democracy is a combination of input and output. A very important part of traditional Chinese political philosophy is people-centeredness, in which government policies have to be in the interest of the people, and this is actually an understanding of democracy from the output side. Today, the CPC’s philosophy of democracy is to come from the people, to go to the people, to come from the people, to rely on the people, and to be for the people, which means practicing democracy at both the input and output ends. While emphasizing the full participation of the people, it is also important to emphasize that government officials take the initiative to serve the people and do things for the people on their own initiative. For example, we can see that in the process of poverty alleviation, countless party members and cadres went to villages to live with the people, to think of solutions and to solve practical problems for them, and this is the most realistic form of democracy in the living world.

The fifth question is whether democracy is procedural or substantive. The classical Western theorists of democracy used to put forward the theory of substantive democracy, but today Western democracy is practiced as procedural democracy, what Schumpeter called modern procedural democracy, in which politicians compete for the people’s consent to rule through a specific electoral process. But even if the procedure is perfectly legal, it may create a situation where the substance is meaningless, or even a complete departure from substance, for example, one indicator of the deterioration of American democracy is the fact that the people have little influence on policy, and that competitive elections provide more of a psychological placebo. Another indicator is the prevalence of short-term and superficial politics, where politicians focus on short-term issues and the democratic system has no way of solving long-term and fundamental problems, such as backwardness in infrastructure, the huge gap between the rich and the poor, the rising level of government debt, shootings, and racial conflicts, all of which constrain the long-term development of the United States and have become insurmountable.

Chinese-style democracy is precisely the unification of procedural and substantive democracy, with procedural democracy serving substantive democracy. The realization of people’s sovereignty is not achieved through a virtual social contract that transforms power from God’s mandate to the people’s mandate, but through an intermediary that serves as the people’s stand-in, the Communist Party of China (CPC), which has become the highest form of organization and the highest expression of the will of the Chinese people. The CPC has become the highest form of organization and the highest expression of the will of the Chinese people. The realization of people’s self-rule through the intermediary of a substitute is based on the subject-object dialectical relationship between the Party and the people, in which the two are the subjects and objects of each other. First, the people are the masters, while the Party is the tool for realizing the people’s will, and the Party’s policies need to come from the people and reflect the people’s will and claims.

Secondly, the party is the highest political leadership of the country, the party is the backbone of the people, while the people are the followers. The subject-object dialectic between the people and the Party is the essence of Chinese people’s democracy, and the realization of people’s sovereignty lies precisely in the endless and close interaction between the people and the Party. Chinese-style democracy is a closed loop of public opinion, democracy, and people’s livelihood. It is similar to the process of cooking a hot pot, in which public opinion is like throwing all kinds of spices into the hot pot, the process of democracy is the process of cooking the hot pot, and democracy also has to solve the problems of people’s livelihood, and in the end, it also has to serve out the dishes cooked in the hot pot for everyone to enjoy. In China’s major policies, including the two sessions of the National People’s Congress that we have just concluded, there are a large number of issues related to people’s livelihoods, and when we go to various places for research, we will see that the government has to have a list of practical things to do for people’s livelihoods every year, and they need to be implemented.

Sixthly, is democracy a search for consensus or a creation of division? Western-style democracy is originally a mechanism for compromising interests and coordinating ideas. Competitive elections provide a mechanism for temporary compromise in the struggle between different factions, and at the same time, many coordinating mechanisms are set up on the basis of the framework of the system of separation of powers and checks and balances. However, in recent years, we have observed the deterioration of democracy, which has made it increasingly difficult to heal divisions. One indicator is the prevalence of veto politics, where the decision-making process is full of veto players, vetoes for the sake of vetoes, deliberation but no decision, decisions but no action, and prolonged debates over a single policy issue, which often lead to a political stalemate.

The second indicator is the polarization of party ideology. In the past, it was believed that the two-party system would tend towards the middle and would strive for middle-of-the-road voters, but from the viewpoint of the political evolution of the United States in recent years, it has become more and more obvious that the struggle and conflict between the ideologies of the two parties are polarized.

The third indicator is the policy flip-flop problem brought about by the rotation of political parties. Washington pointed out back then that party politics is nothing more than a faction temporarily overpowering the other faction, and that it is a rotating dictatorship, and now this problem has become even more prominent. Political party rotation leads to a policy of a moment left, a moment right, both sides of the repeated tossing, when George W. Bush implemented the policy of ABC (all but clinton), that is, in addition to what Clinton has done other can do, Trump came up to the whole Obama’s policy of the whole overturned, Biden and most of the Trump’s policy inverted.

China’s democratic politics is a process of finding consensus. 1.4 billion Chinese people have diverse interests and concepts, but the general direction of pursuing national rejuvenation and people’s happiness is the same. The relationship between the CPC and the democratic parties is not one of competition or confrontation, but one of collaboration. In the decision-making process, different subjects participate in the policy as inputs, not as veto players, and the goal is not to constrain but to make the policy better, so that different groups can find out the greatest common denominator and draw a concentric circle through the process of democratic discussion and consultation. The goal is to make policy formulation better. The change of government is not a turning of the cake, but a relay of the baton, one baton after another, one term after another, which will enable us to continue to push forward the goal of socialist modernization in our century-long history.

“One flower blooming alone is not spring, but a hundred flowers blooming together will fill the garden with spring”. Different countries and peoples will give their own answers to the quest for democracy, and there is no need to copy the so-called standard answers of the West. Making comparisons with each other does not mean that China’s full-process people’s democracy is perfect, Chinese-style democracy still faces challenges in many aspects and has many shortcomings, but first of all, we need to firmly establish our institutional confidence, just as Marx said back then, there are roses here, so let’s dance here. At the same time, we need to keep pushing forward the construction of people’s democracy in the whole process, and keep improving the level and quality of democracy, so that the flower of democracy in China can bloom more vividly, and the light of democracy in China can shine more brightly, so that China can contribute to mankind’s efforts to transcend the narrow, superficial, and inferior view of democracy, and to the construction of a better, higher-quality democracy for mankind in the 21st century.

Notes:

[1] Introduction to Aristotle’s Athenian Political System. The population of Athens was between 300,000 and 500,000, the number of adult males in Athens was between 45,000 and 50,000, excluding about 6,000 to 10,000 overseas residents, there were between 35,000 and 44,000 people with citizenship, which shows that the citizens of Athens only accounted for about one-tenth of the Athenian population.

[2] See Giovanni Sartori, A New Treatise on Democracy, translated by Feng Keli and Yan Kewen, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2009 edition, p. 34.

[3] Wang Shaoguang, Four Lectures on Democracy, Life, Reading and Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, p. 146, 2018.

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